Google class debuts at the UW

Students learn firm's approach to programming

[Editor's Note: This story has been updated since it was first published. Christophe Bisciglia's name was originally misspelled.]

At 26 and at the top of his game as one of Google's vaunted software engineers, Christophe Bisciglia found himself bored and restless. Writing computer code at the world's most successful Internet company had become a mind-numbing chore. Even the outside diversions his hefty Google salary afforded him -- weekly pedicures, Costa Rica getaways and wind farm investments -- didn't get his juices flowing.

Leaving Google was out of the question, so he toyed with the idea of a change of pace -- perhaps a stint in the China or India offices. Then he had a brainstorm: Why not create a Google 101 class to teach college students how to program the way that Google does?

Bisciglia would design the course under Google's "10 percent" program, which allows employees to use 10 percent of their work time to dream up big ideas. Some of Google's most successful features were born that way, such as the "did you mean?" function, which helps users correct misspelled search terms.

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His idea was launched last month as Google's new pilot project at the University of Washington. The class is aimed at creating programming prodigies and revamping the way colleges teach computer science.

"When I interview college students, they have a grasp of computing, but it's fundamentally different," Bisciglia said. The youngest of Google's employees need months of training, he said, because what they've learned in school is outdated. The hope is that the class will mitigate that problem.

Unlike typical computer science, which teaches people to use one computer for solving problems such as how to count the number of times the word "mild" appears in a Charles Dickens classic, Google will teach students to use 40 computers to solve problems such as how many times the word "mild" appears on the Internet and which "mild" is most relevant to Internet users.

Outside of the classroom, Google solves these kinds of questions using hundreds of thousands of servers all over the world. Since 1999, when Google started, the company has developed its own programs to manage the Internet's massive data. Competitors Yahoo and Microsoft have been playing catch-up to Google's technology.

Most companies are following Google's lead in the quest for the perfect search, said computer science professor Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington, and now his students are following, too. They're learning to create a computing system that organizes and makes sense of massive amounts of information. "It's incredible," Lazowska said. "It helps us keep our curriculum current in ways we couldn't do ourselves."

Google isn't alone in its corporate presence on campus. Microsoft built the school's new $7.2 million computer science building. Intel donated all of its computers. The computer science department gets no state funding for equipment or course development, Lazowska said, so it relies heavily on outside contributions.

Bisciglia, who graduated from the UW in 2003, went to Lazowska with his idea in October, and they worked with engineers in Google's Kirkland office to develop a syllabus for 15 undergraduates selected to take the five-week class, which recently wrapped up. No proprietary Google software was used, no internal secrets revealed, Bisciglia said. It was all open source.

Students who took the course may not end up working for Google at all but may instead use their new skills to work for the competition. That's a risk Google is willing to take.

"It's not about our competitors," Google program manager Chris DiBona said. Companies have to think about pushing technology forward, he said.

Over the years, Lazowska said, he has seen hundreds of his engineering students snag jobs at Google's offices in Santa Monica and Mountain View, Calif.; Kirkland; New York; and Zurich. About half are undergraduates.

One undergraduate in the course is fourth-year student Sierra Michels-Slettvet.

"I'm so pumped," she said. "This is a different way to solve problems, a different way to think about the world."